Louis Leakey on the failure of the stage model of human evolution
From Louis Leakey in 1965:
From Louis Leakey in 1965:
The jaws of ancient human relatives that we call “Australopithecus” show the problems of thinking about evolution as a straight line of gradual change.
Current Biology has a fascinating paper by Frédéric Bigey and coworkers examining the genomic variation of bakery yeasts: “Evidence for Two Main Domesticatio...
Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, introduced the idea that the relationships between organisms form a tree.
This is a nice write-up by Laura Geggel of a current exchange of comments in Nature about dinosaur phylogeny: “Dino Family Tree Overturned? Not Quite, But Ch...
For some people who follow human evolution news, recognizing “species” is really just about whether you’re a lumper or a splitter. Many people assume that th...
Stacey Smith summarizes the problems with using the term “basal” when discussing phylogenetic positions of organisms: “The ancestors are not among us”.
A neat new paper by Kieren Mitchell and colleagues in Biology Letters has an mtDNA phylogeny for some extinct bears of the Americas. The main conclusion is t...
The Botanist in the Kitchen takes a look at the phylogenetic relationships among some of the major plant foods in Western diets: “The Food Plant Tree of Life...
Did Homo erectus get herpes from chimps?
Ten years ago I published a paper on the failure of cladistics to resolve questions of early hominin relationships. My study used computer simulation to prod...
Leakey, Tobias and Napier (1964) defined the species, Homo habilis. A simple species diagnosis was not enough: Leakey and colleagues had to argue for an expa...
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I’m doing some reading and ran across a 2009 post by Brian Switek (“Darwin, Ardi and the African apes”), who touched on a little-appreciated aspect of Darwin...
Adam Van Arsdale considers whether a “bushy”, speciose phylogeny is actually evidence of evolutionary “complexity”: “Linearity and simplicity in the fossil r...
Re: “Taxonomy on tap”, where I reminded readers about my lack of a principled reason to continue using “hominid” instead of “hominin”.
Out of all the lectures in the course, this was one of my favorites to put together. I return to the topic of evolutionary developmental biology, first raise...
Our relationship to other kinds of primates is in part reflected by the pattern of similarities and differences we share with them. This pattern of similarit...
Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison have published a review paper in NatureWood:Harrison:2011, arguing that the extent of anatomical convergence among Miocene ap...
Brian Switek notes a new study on the locomotor dynamics of sloths. I perked up when reading this passage…
I ran across this passage in a book chapter by D. Tab Rasmussen, covering early catarrhine evolution. I think it captures an important point about the fossil...
Franz Weidenreich, in his 1945 article, “The Puzzle of Pithecanthropus”:
Remember that story from last month about how fruit flies have some kind of free will because they navigate their flight in nondeterministic directions?
I ran across this paper from a few years ago by John Avise and DeEtte Walker, which considers the implication of reticulation-based species concepts for mt...
Did I miss a meeting?
The April issue of Discover has a feature article on PhyloCode, focusing on the roles of Jacques Gauthier and Kevin de Queiroz in trying to revise the code ...
To test phylogenetic hypotheses, scientists must be able to find out which similarities indicate a close relationship between species and which do not. The ...
Speciation is the cessation of interbreeding between one animal population and all other populations with which it formerly exchanged genes. When interbreed...
A new population that results from a speciation event is called a species. But although species result from a simple process, recognizing species in nature ...
Defining and identifying species is one major area of research into the evolutionary process. Equally important is the study of how different species are re...
Evolutionary relationships among the living apes and humans were difficult to determine when paleontologists had only their morphology to compare them. Darw...